The 2,000 Year Old Punchline

Last month, the American Film Institute did something it had never done in a quarter century of list making. It reorganised its “100 Years… 100 Laughs” canon and elevated Blazing Saddles from sixth place to first, crowning it the funniest film of all time. The occasion was Mel Brooks’s hundredth birthday. The man born Melvin Kaminsky in a Brooklyn tenement, who cleared landmines in the Ardennes before clearing a path through American comedy, had spent decades kvetching that his 1974 Western satire was funnier than Some Like It Hot. AFI’s president finally conceded. “He’s right,” said Bob Gazzale. “It’s good to be the king.”

It is good to be the king. But the kingdom is older than any single court jester, and the throne room stretches from the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement to the comedy clubs of Tel Aviv, from the Borscht Belt lodges of the Catskills to a sold out Radio City Music Hall in the spring of 2026, where a Tel Aviv born comedian called MODI played two packed houses and proved that Jewish comedy is not a museum exhibit but a living, breathing, ticket selling force.

MODI, born Mordechi Rosenfeld, left Israel at 7, grew up on Long Island, worked as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, and quit it all for open mic nights. Thirty years later, he is the biggest Jewish stand up act in America, and the trajectory tells you something about the genre itself. Jewish comedy has always been the career that sensible people warned you against, the vocation chosen over the profession, the punchline that paid less than the balance sheet but lasted longer.

The lineage is astonishing in its depth. Sid Caesar hired the young Brooks as a writer. In that same writers’ room sat Carl Reiner, with whom Brooks would create the “2,000 Year Old Man” sketches, and Neil Simon, who would become the most commercially successful playwright in Broadway history. From that single television show flowed a river that irrigated half a century of American laughter. Reiner begat The Dick Van Dyke Show. Brooks begat The Producers, Young Frankenstein and Spaceballs. Simon begat The Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park. One writers’ room. One generation. An entire comedic grammar.

And it did not begin there. The roots reach back to the Purimspiel, the carnivalesque plays performed in European Jewish communities from the fourteenth century onward, where congregants mocked biblical figures and, by extension, the powers that oppressed them. Laughter, in the Jewish tradition, has never been merely entertainment. It has been theology. The Talmud records that the sage Rabbah would open each lecture with a joke, a practice so ancient it predates the very concept of the warm up act. To laugh in the face of suffering was not escapism. It was an insistence on survival.

That insistence echoed through the vaudeville circuits of early twentieth century New York, where Jewish performers were among the most visible acts on stage. It echoed through the Borscht Belt, the constellation of resort hotels in the Catskill Mountains where young comics honed their timing in front of audiences who demanded brilliance between the brisket and the cheesecake. Woody Allen worked those rooms. So did Jerry Stiller, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Rodney Dangerfield and Lenny Bruce. The hotels are mostly gone now, but the sensibility they produced conquered the world.

Consider the arithmetic. Jewish people constitute roughly 0.2 per cent of the global population. Yet any serious history of modern comedy is incomprehensible without them. Seinfeld, created by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, redefined the American sitcom. Curb Your Enthusiasm ran for twelve seasons and invented a grammar of cringe that an entire generation of comedians now speaks fluently. Sacha Baron Cohen, raised in a northwest London Jewish household, turned satirical provocation into a global phenomenon. Sarah Silverman, Seth Rogen, Billy Crystal, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Gilda Radner and the late Garry Shandling each bent the arc of comedy in a different direction, and each drew, whether explicitly or instinctively, on a tradition that treats humour as a moral instrument.

In Israel, the tradition has its own voltage. Eretz Nehederet, the satirical sketch show that has run on Israeli television since 2003, routinely mocks prime ministers, generals and rabbis with an irreverence that would make Aristophanes blush. The sketch series The Jews Are Coming spent six seasons reimagining Jewish history as dark comedy. MODI himself quotes the Talmud in interviews, citing the passage that declares the comedian’s task is to make the sorrowful joyful and to bring peace where there is division. It is perhaps the oldest job description in show business.

What unites these figures across a century and a half is not merely ethnicity but a shared understanding that comedy is a form of moral argument. The Jewish joke does not simply relieve tension. It interrogates power. It names absurdity. It insists that the gap between how the world is and how it ought to be is not tragic but ridiculous, and that ridicule is itself a form of repair, a cousin of tikkun olam.

Brooks, at 100, still knows this. He once described making The Producers, his film comedy about staging a deliberately terrible musical glorifying the Third Reich, as his way of getting even. “If I can make this guy ludicrous,” he told Salon, “if I can make you laugh at him, then it’s a victory of sorts.”

The room where that laughter echoes has never emptied. If anything, it grows louder.